2017 Predictions Right, Wrong and Totally Missed

2017 Predictions Right, Wrong and Totally Missed

Before sharing my annual analytics industry trends forecast for 2018, I wanted to quickly summarize reader hot topics and my past predictions right, wrong and totally missed from 2017. Here is a look back at the expected, surprising and shocking waves of industry change.

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In 2017, I was blessed and incredibly fortunate to have an overload of billable work in the feast or famine “gig economy”. Notably there were more sponsored articles this year but only a few of those rose to the top.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence were the most talked about topics

I also noted that my big bet through 2022 is that big tech will dominate the analytics industry. I believe that now more than ever. I hope it is cyclical but I am not betting on that trend to change. In the analytics world, we witnessed further market consolidation, niche vendor setbacks and naive small vendors tout big tech partnerships that rapidly evolved into their own casualties.

Big tech companies are the most powerful force on our planet today

In 2017, big tech expanded ownership of digital media propaganda machines, incessantly advertised and promoted feel-good PR campaigns. They also invested more on tech community sponsorship and open source initiatives. This year we heard more about big tech personal data troves, silencing of dissenting views and daily allegations of fake news. We saw several successful big tech funded legal interventions to change government policies and effective lobbying that resulted in legal exceptions for big tech vendors. As momentum to move business apps and data sources to several cloud vendors continues to alter global market dynamics, those big tech players can easily crush small players in a digital era of deregulation.

Other spot on predictions that I shared include the following:

Embedded analytics growth along with cognitive, predictive and prescriptive analytics increasingly being embedded into line-of-business apps. Salesforce Einstein is a stellar example of that trend becoming reality.

Cloud and hybrid analytics continued growing even in historically cloud-unfriendly markets and vertical industries.

Streaming analytics and data ingestion technologies were adopted for IoT use cases with predictive algorithms to detect exceptions and provide proactive alerts.

Data security and privacy continued to be critical topics in the analytics industry and beyond. The Equifax data breach that put 143 million American consumers sensitive personal information at risk did escalate concerns regarding the current lack of accountability and much needed improvement to secure sensitive data. Pending GDPR laws forced organizations to finally get serious about data management processes and the proper handling of European citizen personal data.

What I Got Wrong

Several predictions that I made ended up not playing out as I had expected. Although Amazon cloud offerings vastly improved and expanded, Amazon Quicksight was practically neglected this year. Google’s TensorFlow and advances in artificial intelligence were astounding. However, there was minimal enhancement to Google Data Studio. IBM Watson Analytics disappeared from the radar after IBM Data Science Experience was introduced last year. Paxata also faded into the background while Trifacta had an incredible year.

Analytics automation is still in an early innovation stage

I was way too early on my pervasive analytics automation and immersive analytics experiences with virtual reality predictions. We saw some analytics automation come to life in 2017 but that automation is still in an early innovation stage. Although I did have several new vendors brief me in the virtual reality for data visualization space, all of them appear to be experimental versus practical for day-to-day analytics use cases.

I had no clue that Zoho, a low-cost cloud SaaS vendor that sells a cloud reporting solution plus many other popular CRM, marketing and business app offerings, grew to win over 30 million customers. I mentioned Zoho as a potential alternative to Microsoft Office 365 or Google’s G Suite earlier this year. I’ll be exploring Zoho Reports in 2018. Based on what I saw in analyst briefing demos, Zoho Reports seems to have more depth and breadth of capabilities than other cloud BI offerings. I was stunned. I still need to test it myself to understand where Zoho shines brightly, what gaps exist and when this one makes sense to recommend.

Zoho grew to win over 30 million customers this year

Lastly, I admit that I never would have guessed that female gender-related challenges would make mainstream headline media news. If these stories received media coverage in the past, they were typically buried, not highlighted and not widely shared. I am still in shock that Time Magazine selected the “silence breakers” for person of the year 2017. Why now after all these years? This was not news for most women. Millions of social media feeds around the world confirmed that point using a #MeToo tag. Women that did speak up were shunned by both men and women. In my opinion, that harsh reality likely won’t change. What might change? I don’t know. There may be additional resources to get help when it is needed. I do know a new crowd-sourced, multi-million dollar legal fund was just started by women in Hollywood. I also noticed a proposed Senate Bill 5423 that would make workplace bullying illegal. Today cruel, financially devastating bullying and sabotage behavior at work is not illegal.

Jen Underwood is a Senior Director at DataRobot and founder of Impact Analytix, LLC. She has a unique blend of product management and “hands-on” experience in data warehousing, reporting, visualization, and advanced analytics. In addition to keeping a constant pulse on industry trends, she enjoys digging into oceans of data to solve complex problems with machine learning.
Over the past 20 years, Jen has held worldwide product management roles at Microsoft and served as a technical lead for system implementation firms. She has experience launching new products and turning around failed projects. Most recently she provided advisory, strategy, educational content development, and marketing services to 100+ technology vendors through her own firm. She has been mentioned by KD Nuggets, Information Management and Forbes for her work. She also has written for InformationWeek, O’Reilly Media, and numerous other tech industry publications.
Jen has a Bachelor of Business Administration – Marketing, Cum Laude from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and a post-graduate certificate in Computer Science – Data Mining from the University of California, San Diego. She was also honored to be a former IBM Analytics Insider, Tableau Zen Master, and Top 10 Women Influencer.